[sharms]

This is a topic that I would love to see brought up more, and I think there is a lot Linux can learn from Solaris. As someone who was only exposed to Solaris in the last 4 years (using Linux since '96), I have become increasingly interested in the seemingly unimportant features which have been incredibly useful.

Zones have a distinct maturity and robustness over LxC (to be expected), ZFS is the filesystem I wish we could have, dtrace isn't a bolt-on etc.

It would be nice to see it fully open-sourced again as I think the one thing it has working against it is a smaller community and it lacks the same size army of driver authors.

[bcantrill]

As rasur mentions, illumos has inherited the Solaris heritage -- and added quite a bit to it besides.[1][2] There are now several vibrant variants of illumos, including SmartOS[3][4], OmniOS[5][6] and DelphixOS[7] -- all of which are open source, and all of which feature advancements in the core differentiators of the system including ZFS, DTrace and zones. Because we collectively have been entirely separate from our Solaris legacy for over three years now (and because we are entirely open source where Solaris is entirely closed source), the differences are actually substantial -- and I don't really think of our system as "Solaris" any more than I think of it as "System V" or "7th Edition" or anything else in our long and complicated ancestry...

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YN6_eRIWWc

[3] http://smartos.org/

[4] https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent

[5] http://omnios.omniti.com/

[6] http://omnios.omniti.com/browse.php

[7] https://github.com/delphix/delphix-os

[angersock]

So, to a newcomer, what are the things that these flavors offer over, say, stock Debian?

[thelambentonion]

While I haven't had a chance to use illumos in any of my projects, the Service Management Facility (SMF)[0] and Fault Manager Daemon (FMD)[1] are two big reasons why I'm looking at switching from FreeBSD to an illumos variant for my home server.

It's been a little while since I've used Debian, but I don't believe any systems comparable to SMF or FMD have been implemented[2].

[0] https://www.illumos.org/man/5/smf

[1] https://www.illumos.org/man/1M/fmd

[2] I'm not sure how well systemd compares to SMF, and I'm mostly interested in FMD/SMF due to how well it can handle ZFS fault management.

[nosequel]

Try reading the linked slide deck for a start.

ZFS, Zones, DTrace, Crossbow, etc., etc.

[lmm]

Have any of the open-source variants implemented ZFS encryption yet?

[ketralnis]

Not directly (Sun open sourced v28, but encryption shows up in v30), but there are other solutions to that problem. e.g. FreeBSD has geom_eli which can happily underly ZFS or any other filesystem (http://www5.us.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/disks-encrypting.htm...)

[pjmlp]

Yeah, many GNU/Linux users tend to think UNIX == GNU/Linux, which couldn't be further from the truth.

Beyond the basic POSIX compatibility, there are lots of differences across UNIX systems, each has their plus and minus points.

[rasur]

You'll be wanting to have a look at IllumOS then, methinks

[freiheit]

There are a couple different ZFS ports for linux available. Native and FUSE. There are some linux distributions which include ZFS and can even do a ZFS root fs.

[bashinator]

I've run into severe problems with using the NFS provided by native ZFS on linux - it tends to completely die under load.